As expected, Noah fell to the #2 spot at the box office this weekend, coming in way, way behind Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which opened to $96.2 million: a record for a movie released in April and one of the biggest openings ever for a Marvel Comics movie that doesn’t feature Iron Man or Spider-Man.

Noah earned an estimated $17 million in North America this weekend, bringing its domestic total up to $72.3 million. That represents a 61.1% drop from last week, which is only slightly higher, percentage-wise, than the 59.5% drop that Son of God had in its second weekend, four weeks ago.

The latest box-office estimates are in, and it seems that Son of God fell out of the top ten in this, its fourth weekend. The film earned $2.7 million between Friday and Sunday, or just a tenth of what it made when it opened three weeks ago. Its total gross now stands at $55.6 million.

The top ten won’t be without a Bible movie for long, though. Darren Aronofsky’s Noah opened in Mexico and South Korea this week and earned $14 million between those two countries, which bodes very well for its domestic release on Friday.

How eager were certain people to make Son of God a box-office hit? Pretty eager, I’d say.

Rick Warren declared, in a video touting one of the “theatre takeovers” that took place Thursday night, that Christians should “skip church and go see” the film on opening weekend, because “it’s that important.”

And on Saturday, Paul Lauer at Motive Entertainment, a Christian marketing firm, sent out an e-mail telling people: [Read more...]